Founders

Welcome to the first Founder's channel Office Hours!

What's on your mind?

I'll kick things off (from an angel investor perspective).

I'm always surprised by 2 things:

1. Founders fundraising who don't use this format for their deck

https://www.slideshare.net/PitchDeckCoach/sequoia-capital-pitchdecktemplate

2. Pre-Series B founders that don't send regular investor updates.

1. Clear asks
2. Intellectually honest
3. Short
4. Minimize requiring clicks outside (Docsend, notion, etc.)

Investors want to help but are often reading the update in line for coffee on their phone

Here's my template:

Building https://srcbook.com // creator of the https://blockchainsmokers.xyz

1. Clear asks
2. Intellectually honest
3. Short
4. Minimize requiring clicks outside (Docsend, notion, etc.)

Investors want to help but are often reading the update in line for coffee on their phone

Here's my template:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y3SmneDvc11XLwPA8sPgci1HN5qNatRHkSNyGVcCJEU/edit?usp=sharing

Tips on what make investor updates great, and what is the right frequency?

There were over 50 submissions (that pinged me). A lot of interesting projects!

Currently wondering how many other FC founders applied to a16z CSS and internally running the odds.

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

Why are so many VCs stuck in the mindset that “innovation can’t happen outside of SF/NYC/London”? I’ve literally had a pitch meeting where a VC asked where I was calling from and after answering Kansas, asked with a pitying face, “why?”

cma.xyz. Founder /paragraph, ceo /mirror, previously at Google & Coinbase 

Haven’t been one myself.

But would imagine a founder group that meets up 2x a month for dinner and/or exec coach could help fill emotional support role.

Prioritization help could be your lead investor.

VC-backed game is about growth and speed of execution. Very few exceptions here but they exist.

Bootstrapped or non-VC game is choose your own adventure. Really depends what you’re optimizing for personally.

What do you think about calm companies (see calm fund) vs blitzscaling?

Chasing Curiosity. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Fullstack Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7. 
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

Should you get chat gpt to write your production smart contracts?

working on farcaster infrastructure @ /neynar, neynar.com  🪐   /rish 

Bay Area is the most serious place to build a startup.

What would you pick between NYC and Bay Area for a new crypto startup?

chain rewards the curious | initial contributor at @interface | /interface /wijuwiju /walkthewalk | online at app.interface.social/wijuwiju.eth

Allowing developers to more easily bootstrap users for novel social apps and services. Better connecting people is a worthwhile endeavor.

What real world problems do you believe Farcaster + projects on top of it can solve, that excites you the most?

1. Taste — Gut

2. Data — Early signs of usage / increased engagement.

3. WDHTB — "what do you have to believe" — assuming you continue to drive increased usage / engagement, do you believe that can expand to greater and greater sized populations. Informed by talking to current users and prospective users

Beyond talking to users and metrics, how do you choose what to prioritize to get to pmf?

Eg, what led to doubling down on channels?

Measure experiments in weeks not months

Consumer is about revealed preference, enterprise is about getting sales (slightly different).

Yes, many shifts in direction, in retrospect we should have been more ruthless about declaring an experiment failed and getting rid of the feature, etc.

Do you have a framework for experimentation vs execution (when to pivot and try something new, when to keep going, etc…).

Did early farcaster go thru pivots?

Midwest mom in a California dad bod || Ruthlessly pro Farcaster

1. Embedded wallets make more sense on mobile than desktop.

2. Power users will use a dedicated wallet app like Rainbow or MetaMask

3. What wallet signs, pays for txn and where the asset ends up might be different. Think Farcaster address, Warpcast paymaster and your connected ETH address.

Do you think in app wallets are really going to take off, or just better SSO for crypto apps with less wallet switching

Building @withfam Prev. Co-founder @ Talisman ✴︎ Member @ FWB, Refraction, The Park, UFO ✷

How do you choose a legal entity for your startup in a time where regulation is so unclear and shifting globally?

Product & /ux guy interested in new consumer tech | slowly building /firstdraft | markfishman.xyz

Private beta better than a waitlist. Worked well enough for our use case (a social network).

Depends what kind of product you're building. With a SaaS or enterprise product, you really want to focus on triangulating the highest ROI new features based on talking to existing / prospective customers.

What’s your perspective on private betas / waitlists?

How to evolve and scale the Web3 strategic design studio that wants to become a DAO...

Building a self-custody / onchain product that feels like normal/traditional product. 

Really impressed by farcaster so far and curious to understand how it works under the hood. It’s definitely an inspiration to me

if you weren’t working on farcaster, what would you be building today?

building reel.farm and farcasterstudio.com

Depends on the product and what you're optimizing for (venture-scale biz vs. bootstrapped 100% founder owned biz, etc.).

at what MAU/MRR should a founder suggest going all in on a product?

The open web is dead, long live the open web. ⌐◨-◨

Building /warpcast and /farcaster

— gabrielayuso.com

I wonder if there is a formula or rule of thumb that can map a project stage, runway length, etc. to a probability of being funded and at what amount.

i.e.
idea to mvp, 1y runway, 2 ft staff-swe: $X

mvp to 1K DAU, 2y runway, 2 ft staff-swe + 1 pt designer: $Y

Does this make sense?
Is there such a thing?